The City and the Stars
Cover of the first edition
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| Author | Arthur C. Clarke |
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| Cover artist | George Salter |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Science fiction |
| Publisher | Frederick Muller Ltd |
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Publication date
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June 1956 |
| Media type | Print—hardcover and paperback |
| Pages | 256 pp |
| Preceded by | Against the Fall of Night |
The City and the Stars is a science fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke, published in 1956. This novel is a complete rewrite of his earlier novella, Against the Fall of Night, which was Clarke's first novel, and was published in Startling Stories magazine in 1948, after John W. Campbell, Jr. had rejected it, according to Clarke.
Several years later, Clarke revised his novel extensively and he renamed it The City and the Stars. The new version was intended to showcase what he had learned about writing, and about information processing. The major differences are in individual scenes and in the details of his contrasting civilizations of Diaspar and Lys. To everyone's surprise, Against the Fall of Night remained popular enough to stay in print after The City and the Stars had been published. In introductions to it he has told the anecdote of a psychiatrist and patient who admitted that they had discussed it one day in therapy, without realizing at the time that one had read one novel and one the other.
What follows is a summary of The City and the Stars, but it is a broadly accurate description of both of the books about Alvin, except for the role of Khedron, who replaced a different character from the earlier novel, and for the nature of the immortality of the people of Diaspar.
The City and the Stars takes place one billion years in the future, in the city of Diaspar. By this time, the Earth is so old that the oceans have gone and humanity has all but left. As far as the people of Diaspar know, theirs is the only city left on the planet. The city of Diaspar is completely enclosed. Nobody has come in or left the city for as long as anybody can remember, and everybody in Diaspar has an instinctive insular conservatism. The story behind this fear of venturing outside the city tells of a race of ruthless invaders which beat humanity back from the stars to Earth, and then made a deal that humanity could live—if they never left the planet.
In Diaspar, the entire city is run by the Central Computer. Not only is the city repaired by machines, but the people themselves are created by the machines as well. The computer creates bodies for the people of Diaspar to live in and stores their minds in its memory at the end of their lives. At any time, only a small number of these people are actually living in Diaspar; the rest are retained in the computer's memory banks.
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Wikipedia